Citizen science projects and biohacking activities are both activitiesperformed by non-professionals, artists, or citizens, but with a diffferentmode of appropriation. While the intent of citizen science projects is tocontribute to research experiments and contributors are expected to ‘followthe rules,’ biohacking is a bottom-up movement that is based upon subvertingexisting knowledge structures.

function is both constitutive and symbolic, as instrumentslike microscopy served as “a means to and a symbol of mechanical objectiv-ity” (Daston and Galison 2007, 139). With the microscope as an objectivemediator, scientists tried to eliminate the subject. The epistemic messageof the microscope is a tool for creating objective knowledge. Today, moreinvolvement and subjectivity of scientists in microscopic image productionis common practice. Using software programs to correct, to crop, or to alterimages is a commonplace. For instance, color is often added in order tohighlight specifijic elements of an image.

The focus of this chapter is on ‘activist simulation games,’ which aremotivated by an activist or political intention on the part of the game-maker, and which attempt to harness simulation and procedurality in thegame to convey the maker’s political critique or message to the playingpublic. Schleiner argues that that the ‘toyness’ of the world of such games,the miniature abstraction of the model that announces itself as game,not life, contributes to a nullifijication of the game’s critical impact. Tobreak away from this situation, she argues, requires a ‘broken toy tactic’of interruption or sabotage that breaks the spell of games’ procedural,operational logic.

The brokenness of September 12thmanifests in that playing well delivers loss, subverting the expectationof the player to master a rewarding challenge of eliminating terrorists. InMcDonald’s Video Game, on the other hand, the very operationality of themodel of fast food production cycles transmitted to the player overcomesthe game’s critical impact.

toy-like, cheerful cow and hamburger world that the ironic subtext of thisbeing an unethical business practice is often missed by players. For instance,when my game design students in Singapore played McDonald’s Video Game,they seemed largely unconcerned about the detrimental side efffects of thistype of production on workers, animals, consumers, or the environment.

A tactical recipe for the activist simulation game consists then of twosteps, fij irst a positive, then a negative; fij irst to constructively programa simulation of a harmful operation from the world into the game, fol-lowed up by either a game-maker, or player instigated interruption, orsabotage that breaks the spell of the game’s movement and procedurality,thereby illuminating its operationality in a critical light.

The conventions of a conspiracythriller for example, require that the complexities of a historical situa-tion—such as energy transition—are simplifijied in a kind of morality playin which bad characters (such as Chen and, to a lesser degree, Jack) embodybad behavior, and good people (such as Tony and Vera, unraveling theconspiracy) defeat them in the end.

Impact of different energy sources

petro-capitalist,authoritarian states with a questionable reputation with regard to democracyand human rights. Countries such as Russia, Iran, and Venezuela use theirenergy supplies as a political weapon to defend their strategic interests.

his discoverythat China is indeed delivering weapons to Iran;

To better understand the persuasive power of Collapsus as a whole,we can direct our attention to what documentary theorist Michael Renovcalls “the four fundamental tendencies or rhetorical/aesthetic functionsattributable to documentary practice,” which are to express, to analyzeor interrogate, to reveal, and to persuade or promote (

Collapsus isan important case to discuss because it succeeded—back in 2010—in imagining the social andpolitical implications of global warming in an innovative way. It was aimed at a predominantlyyounger and connected generation. Statistics show that it is difffijicult for documentary fijilms toreach young audiences; only 18-20 per cent is younger than 34 years old. Collapsus reached 41per cent of that age category.

Smaller game jams are occasionally even ‘designed’ and leveraged as toolsfor political participation themselves. For instance, the GeziJam was held inJune 2013 to support and raise awareness of the protesters trying to stall thedestruction of the Taksim Gezi Park in Istanbul. The conceptually related#JamForLeelah reflected on the suicide of Leelah Alcorn in December 2014and challenged participants to tackle the issue of transgender sensibilitiesthrough the creation of games. In some cases, game developers are trying tomonetize this awareness and create games to raise funds for socio-politicalcauses. For instance, the game Kubba was created by Ahmed Abdelsamea(2012), an Egyptian indie designer, to generate revenue benefij iting therefugees of the Syrian civil war (Curley 2012). The game mimics the moreor less iconic Western game franchise Cooking Mama (Offfijice Create 2006),challenging players to prepare the eponymous Syrian dish, Kubba. Thegame is a variation of the earlier Flash game Ta’mya (2012); yet, while theoriginal has English text and is available on Kongregate

The role of intellec-tual property rights has massively increased since the late 1990s.This is no longer just about copyright but huge numbers of pat-ents and micro-patents that cover software, protocols, operat-ing systems, algorithms, data feeds, and so on.64 This allows theplatforms to stay way ahead of smaller, later competitors whohave little chance of reaching the scale of data collection andcomputing power available to the giants. It also allows themto effectively charge “rent” (economic actors receiving rewards“purely by virtue of controlling something valuable”) on thosesystems, platforms, and infrastructures.

freelance, indie cul-tural scenes are slowly disappearing.20It is this that lies behind the growing concern with culturallabour.

It might be that some targeted basic income for artists schemewould work. It is selective and so perhaps akin to a fellowshipscheme. The Irish experiment will tell us a lot here.

In neoclassical and neoliberal economics, state spendingon services is framed as being paid for by the “productive” –i.e. profitable – sector of the economy. But, as we learned inthe pandemic, the most useful and essential parts of our soci-ety are often the least profitable and their workers the leastremunerated. Many profitable sectors are not useful, andoften quite damaging. Large parts of the hyper-profitablefinance sector are parasitic on the public service sector. AsI argued in Chapter 2, this “productive” economy relies on awhole set of disavowed systems – education, domestic labour,environment – without which its profits would be impossible.

More generally, “efficiency” has proved brittlein the pandemic, as “just-in-time” systems with little “slack”shut down rapidly. Resilience and adaptability

The FEC critique the “supply-side” approach to growth, both asineffective in providing these elusive “good jobs” and in assum-ing aggregate GDP will “will lift all boats”. The FEC’s goal is toreorient social and economic policy away from a GDP-centred,individualised jobs-and-wages growth to a focus on guaranteedcollective liveability.It is disposable household income, rather than wages perse, that should provide a key metric.

How, then, do we reassert culture’s role in public policy?Many who seek to give culture a distinct function have beentempted to add it as a measure or priority alongside the “eco-nomic”. Advocacy such as the “fourth pillar” adds culture tothe “triple bottom line” of economic, social, and environmen-tal impact. But simply adding “culture” leaves “economy”unexamined, a “black box”.6 Like many such attempts, it isconstantly surprised when the real bottom line turns out to be“economy” after all. 7 In this sense, we need to challenge what“economy” actually entails.

Humans are subject to these material needs, but their purposeand agency are not set by the imperatives of material survival.The purposes of human lives are set by normative not naturalimperatives. By “ought” not “instinct”. These normative pur-poses, in turn, can be changed in the light of self-reflection.“As distinct from natural freedom, spiritual freedom requiresthe ability to ask which imperatives to follow in the light of ourends, as well as the ability to call into question, challenge andtransform our ends themselves”.28Humans also generate surplus time, after material necessi-ties have been met, but nothing tells them how they ought touse this time. They themselves must decide this. Material andspiritual freedom are inseparable – there is no spiritual realmapart from the material – but they are not the same. Spiritualfreedom is a higher order of freedom; it is dependent on naturebut transcends it. The way we lead our lives is not set by mate-rial necessity but set by us. To which I would add that culture,at its broadest, is the name we give to the collective patterningof our material and spiritual freedoms, patterns based not juston communication – all plants and animals communicate – buton symbolisation, forms of speaking about what we ought to do.

When Indigenous peoples talk about culture, it is ofsomething foundational to their lives, inseparable from them.

This is too restrictive. Without water, one dies in nine days,yet one can live for years without human touch. Is the lattera luxury? Of course, the removal of water, food, electricity, orshelter makes life incredibly difficult very quickly, and it wouldtake some time (childcare issues aside) for the closure of schools,or general health and social services, to register an impact. Butwe all accept these things as part of the social foundations.“Essential worker” is also a contested term

Culture, in both its individual tra-jectory and its social guarantee, is thus essential to the develop-ment of individual capabilities, as in the work of Amartya Senand Martha Nussbaum, and thus an essential part of demo-cratic citizenship, a fundamental human right.

I argue that freedom is as foundational to humans as satisfy-ing material needs

Health, education,housing, transport, food, energy, water, basic communicationsystems – should these not be fixed before we get to culture?1In what follows I make an argument for the centrality ofculture in overcoming the present crisis, and in the followingchapters sketch out what such an agenda might look like. Weneed to acknowledge the “legitimation crisis” to which culture-as- industry was a response – art associated with elitism andpatrician subsidy, the growth of the culture industries

justifies inaction through despair, encouraging usto postpone doing anything until the “big day of revolution”.

Neoliberalism, a distinct phase of global capitalism thatemerged in the early 1980s, is in crisis. The economic, politi-cal, and social solutions it brought to the prior crisis of Fordistsocial democracy in the 1970s no longer work. That muchmight be broadly agreed. It has become ever clearer since the2008– 10 global financial crisis. Stagnant growth, stalled wages,growing inequality, cost- of-living increases, rising indebtedness,increasing precarity of employment, and the erosion of publicservices are the stuff of the nightly news. This is accompaniedby widespread disaffection and disconnection from the politicalprocess, resulting in alternating moments of political efferves-cence (often as anti-politics) and resigned passivity. This in theface of a growing perception of the deepening hold of powerfulelites over the workings of government, in the form of lobby-ing, political finance, corruption, cronyism, the public–private“revolving door”, and a pervasive cynicism towards techno-cratic political expertise

To achieve these goals wouldrequire that we tackle the ownership and control of the culturalindustries themselves

For TimJackson, modern consumerism is a catastrophe, and the soonerwe exit from it the better. Kate Soper, who flags a less puri-tanical approach in her book on “alternative hedonism”, alsosees much of modern cultural consumption as the problem tobe solved.

It accu-mulates rights over protocols, platforms, algorithms, data, andtechnologies, as well as copyright

There certainly are cul-tural industries, the large-scale organised production of culturalgoods and services, and these need to be taken very seriously.But culture is not itself an industry, nor is its function to produce“jobs and growth” or “catalyse innovation”. It is part of ourdemocratic citizenship, an inalienable element of our universalhuman rights, and essential for our reimagining of the future.The key argument of the book is that culture, as an objectof public policy, should be moved out of “industry” and backinto the sphere of public responsibility alongside health, edu-cation, social welfare, and basic infrastructure.

The calls by Williams,Hall, and others for creative freedom, for popular participa-tion, and for democratic control were certainly made againstthe formal official arts system but they went beyond these. Forthem the whole system of cultural production and distribution,including the “cultural industries” and public media, was a keysite of a political struggle for an expanding democratic, socialcitizenship.

That it contributes not just to “mental wellbeing” but is essen-tial to our citizenship, as autonomous, flourishing individuals ina strong democratic polis.Art and culture provide a distinct space in which our individ-ual freedom is facilitated and constantly examined. This free-dom is positive – it is freedom to do, to become – and requires asocial and cultural infrastructure to make it possible. This free-dom is not simply about desires and wants, but about decidingwho we ought to be and what we ought to do. It is ethical orspiritual freedom.

As I argue in the next chapter, creativ-ity as “input” was crucial to how culture was absorbed into alanguage of economy. It was central to the construction of thenew, self-directed subjects of “creative capitalism”, with their“always-on” networked personas and blurred line between liv-ing and working. But creativity was also an answer to art andculture’s “democratic deficit”. If art was seen as elitist

For these, the fetishisation of GDP

The data set is also primarily focused on North American game-makers, as 47 games analyzed were made in the United States orCanada.

At odds with this goal isthe need to document and analyze this work before it dissipates fromonline stores, runs out of stock, no longer works with contemporaryhardware or otherwise becomes unavailable. Anyone who has donethis kind of work recognizes the myriads of challenges indocumenting play and designed play experiences. In this space inparticular, limited budgets, deprecated software (e.g. Adobe Flash)the need to perpetually update hardware and software, and theculling of low volume sales software on app stores all createaccelerated expiration dates. Archiving such work is no longermerely an effort in saving digital files on redundant drives but alsomeans using snapshots of old operating systems and emulatingsoftware environments that are no longer available. It also meansphotographing and playing analog games multiple times to captureelements not obvious about such games.

The chapter contains a content analysis of 50 games by Black gamemakers.

I love thisindustry. I love it enough to have dedicated half my career to it. Ilove it enough to praise it and to tell it when it’s making a mistake.With love comes responsibility - a responsibility to care, appreciateand respect. This book serves as an opportunity to help the gamemaking community grow, reflect, and improve itself.

invoking the metaphorical, Black card, without accepting the rightsand responsibilities therein. It can read as a way of doing providingthe minimally viable product, a representation of Blackness, assubstitute for invigorating the work with authentic Blackness. Tosome it may play as the Cigar Store Indian has, an offense to boththe ceremonial use of tobacco and image of the noble savagecaricature.

Featuring people of color, does not make it agame for people of color, just as wrapping a game box in Africangreen and gold make it more authentic. Such efforts may actuallydo the oppositive, emphasizing their inauthenticity in choices thatare ignorant of authentic blackness (if such a thing exists).

The problem of Mancala, if it can be framed as such, is alsodemonstrated in the research’s slowly antiquating line of thinking.A line of thinking, that has routes in a colonial history valuing theperson who absconded the artifact, over the people who produced it.One that saw a hero in a tomb raider. A culture that sought the onesecret treasure that unlocked some knowledge, provided access to amystical power, and gave dominion over others

examines the historical evidence to“dispel a long-standing belief that so-called complex societies aremore likely to play strategic games” (2021). In that analysis, aresome hints at a larger, problematic, and perhaps systematictendency. The tendency to want to see monolithic pattern, to make ageneral case of a diverse group, or as we more commonly put it –stereotype.

In half a year, the game raised close to half a million dollarsand nearly 250,000 books in total donations that went on to benefit girlsliving in the conditions represented in-game, as well as $160,000 for sur-geries throughout the world.

Balogh’s adoption of not just onebut many racial identities demonstrates the flexibility with which whitepeople take on other identities, often in the name of valuing or “respect-ing” them. This availability, second, underwrites the fluidity of relations ofidentification between white individuals and race, in that, in contrast tothose who are racially interpellated, the basis of these relations is a matterof individual determination; the basis of racial identity can be less a matterof imposed categories than subjective selection. Thereby, third, thoserelations themselves are disposable or, alternately, inalienable.

The argument presented is one that takesits case study from a game that, on top of utilizing “high-tech blackface”as a method of player/avatar interaction, is also filled with a very limitedsuite of racial tropes of Black people, particularly limited to “ghettoized”identities. Leonard’s suggestion is that this leads to players being renderedas a sort of “virtual ghetto tourist” (2004, 4).

game Everyday Racism (Everyday Racism, 2014a,2014b), developed by researchers across several universities, has soughtto address racism

with franchises such as Pokémon and The Legend of Zeldaappealing equally to male and female players (Ito 2011, 97). Since the riseof more gender-inclusive online communities on fannish blogging plat-forms such as LiveJournal and Tumblr, female fans have reconfiguredcanonical narratives to represent their own interests and experiences.

trolls scavenge, repurpose,and weaponizemyriad aspects of mainstream cultur

What does social justice-orientedgame design look like, and how should developers institute it?

“The worst waswhen I won a roll on an item and the guild leader threatened to tear mybreasts into bloody shreds. I met him a year later in person. He was prettyfucking embarrassed and apologized profusely—clearly this wasn’t some-thing he thought was OK when he met me in real life, but it was somethinghe thought was OK in a video game.” Other incidents she recounted weresimilarly repulsive, but her guild did not penalize anyone for their behaviortoward her. Thus, gaming reinscribed misogynistic violence as a regular,everyday behavior—even when players ostensibly knew better.

Theexisting reporting process is a reactive one, where players who witnessanother player breaching official game policy are burdened with the respon-sibility to submit a report to Blizzard Entertainment (ibid.). There is nofurther information provided about how the report is handled after submis-sion other than to say that a Game Master will investigate.

Bloodborne’s narrative details and mechanics are too convoluted, intri-cate, and scattered for any one person to uncover on their own. If you wantto understand Bloodborne, then you must take to its community. A com-prehensive view of the game cannot be accomplished in a single play-through by a solitary player. It takes the collaboration of many playersand their countless, varied, subjective playthroughs to collect and archivethe knowledge necessary to even begin to understand the game.

By regardingplay as an appropriative activity that is situated in subject ivity, identity,and experience, this method expands opportunities for inter sectionalanalysis, illuminates diversities of play styles, and avoids t he reinforce-ment of an essentialist gender binary.

70% (n = 91) of women and 54% (n = 116) of menalso disagreed with the statement that “men in the industry are educatedor informed on the issue of sexism.” Most of the boys’ club atmospherethat women cited as uncomfortable was rooted in unprofessional officeconversations that men were comfortable engaging in

Of all the jobs I have done, this is the most worry-free. It’s allabout playing online games. I play games anyway whenever I havetime, even if it is not for gold farming. Now I get paid for playinggames. This is killing two birds with one stone. What more can Iask for?

How is gold farming any different from deliv-ering box lunches?

embodya post-feminist ethos regarding WIG initiatives. These women’s visibilityin the conservative production culture of gaming places them in a precari-ous position: while they may be the best positioned to champion a feministagenda like ECMGM, they must also navigate potential backlash fromcolleagues, the player base, and other key figures who could threaten theirjob security.

Across industries in the United States,women are more likely than men to work part-time jobs, especially if theyhave children—38 percent of mothers compared to 4 percent of fathers(Allard and Janes 2008). Part-time work, however, is rare in the gamingindustry. As a result, female employees with children tend to take jobs inareas of the industry that offer more predictable hours. While thisresponse to working constraints may enable working mothers to balancework with childcare demands, working part-time frustrates career devel-opment. Part-time workers are less likely to land promotions and raises(Prescott and Bogg 2014)

We all very quickly found that the interface of the Creator Mode wasnot particularly well-suited to creating our missions.

, I do not think that thereis any company on Earth that wants to be known as the one thatprovided a platform for creating a simulator where you forceyoung children to work in factories for ten cents a day.

discussion of Augusto Boal’s (1979) alienating techniques. Frasca writes,“The scene always enacts an oppressive situation, where the protagonisthas to deal with powerful characters that do not let her achieve her goals,”and is “enacted without showing a solution to the problem” (64–65). Inthis method of Forum Theater, the scene is then repeated, and membersof the audience are encouraged to “interrupt the play and take over theplace of the protagonist and suggest, through her acting, thesolution thatshe envisions would break the oppression

if there is to be an ethics based on corporeality that is to be sensitive tosocial justice causes and, indeed, lead toward the fruition of social justice,undoing the distinction between real and virtual is the mostsignificantand important element

n conceptual terms, using the Gamergate example, whenmen come to encounter women in the digital spaces of gaming culture—whether in-game or out-game communication is involved—they arerequired in an ethics of recognition to consider how to treat women in thecontext of scandal reporting/information.

example, choosing one’s Pokémon Go avatar in such a way as to match one’sself-perception of a gendered, racialized, or ethnic body i n terms of avail-able discourses of categorization—alternatively, of c ourse, to provide acounterplay and reflexively choose against the grain (Willson 2015, 20).

Pokémon Go players who have arrived bodily at the same Poké stop, or thosenon-playing bodies we encounter along the way. There is, in this contexttoo, a broader population of bodies that we will never meet and never knowbut who will be affected by decisions both ethical and unethical. This is topoint to the very complex “assemblage” between bodies, gaming, technol-ogies, socialities, and relational engagements that may occur in both localand digitally defined spaces but primarily also outside of it—for example,women who are made vulnerable to violence as a result of the Gamergatename-calling but who themselves are not participants in gaming

This binary informs almost all scholarly writingon games and online play in the context of bodies

radical separationof the body and the mind. This mythical separation, beginning from aCartesian framework

Logged in as “Dead_in_Iraq,” DeLappe types the names of soldiers killed in Iraq, andthe date of their death, into the game’s text messaging system,such that the information scrolls across the screen for all users tosee. DeLappe’s goal is simple: He plans to memorialize the nameof every service member killed in Iraq.

Brianna Wu

In Shaw’s research, finding a place to experience com-munity was more important for queer players than LGBTQ charactersbeing present in the game, and while gaymers didn’t purchase gamesfor queer content, they discussed games where queer content was in-cluded (2012).

The data is also “unfiltered” – partic-ipants’ are less prone to adjusting their responses when voicing theirmomentary thoughts. These responses become a mix of experiences,reflections, etc., making them less linear. However, one weakness withthink-aloud is that the understanding of the responses can be limited.There can be gaps in, or a complete lack of, justifications and reasoning

For this purpose, self-curation can be a better alternativeto memorialization. In other words, the user can be responsible forthe curation of their own legacy prior to death.

As Haverinen explains, RPGstransform an avatar into a character which represents “both the storyof the role-play and the personal interests of the player” (2014a, p. 157).She also states that “the communal spirit is usually strong among play-ers who have played together for hundreds of hours and often evenyears. They have shared their personal lives with each other, and have‘lived’ together in the story they have created for the game”

Sibilla and Mancini (2018) also high-light that identification is increased when players are given the abilityto customize their avatars.Sibilla and Mancini (2018) list two types of user-avatar identification:actualization and idealization.

In-game virtual funerals are a way ofmemorializing this loss.

The in-terview was an in-depth semi-structured qualitative interview conduct-ed in April 2021 via instant messaging

devices like phonesand laptops (2014, p. 129). The data on these devices is frequently in-accessible, for instance due to password protection or because theinformation is scattered across multiple platforms. Nevertheless, thisdata holds material of strong emotional significance for the bereavedor the promise of uncovering new information, causing unnecessaryfrustration or hurt when they cannot be accessed.For this reason, there exists a need for designing hardware and soft-ware that account for a user’s death

Klass et al. (1996) propose the ‘continuing bonds’ model inwhich grief is not perceived in stages but instead it is seen as a rene-gotiation of the relationship the bereaved has to the deceased. Thistheory becomes relevant in the digital age due to an increase in digitaldeath practices that facilitate remembrance and allow the bereavedto maintain their connection

“the Western view ofthe East is greatly influenced by the stereotypical negative images thatHollywood films consistently present”

Web Disability Simulator

Furthermore, having multiple hours of uninterrupted leisure time tospend is a luxury for many. Availability of leisure time interacts withgender, social status and other factors. An analysis by the Office ofNational Statistics (2018) showed that men in the UK enjoyed nearlyfive more hours of leisure time per week than women – a disparity thathas grown wider during the 2000’s. They also found that people wholived alone took more leisure time than people living with children.

Remote playtesting is a potential solution

pos-itivism

Carol Shaw, who createdmany games in the 1970s and 1980s for Atari and Activision, includingVCS Checkers, Qubic, and River Raid (See Fig. 6)

Inthis context, increasingly complex rules or codes of behavior were de-veloped for sport hunting, including rules based in normative ethicssuch as, a hunter who wounds an animal must kill it as an act of mercy;killing a sitting duck is unfair; or hiding out to ambush a creature at asalt lick or watering hole is considered unsportsmanlike. The popular-ity of the sport hunting movement and commercial hunting led to ter-rible over-hunting, which eventually sparked the conservation move-ment

While today game cul-ture, or more specifically ‘gamer culture’ refers to particular sub-set ofplayers of videogames, during the early 1800s game culture referredto people involved in the hobby of hunting for sport (Reynolds, McAl-lister & Ruggill, 2016). Part of what supported the rise of sport huntingas a popular pastime was the development of gun technology

1936 Olympic Games

Some researchers look at someone creating analternative history in a game, like a small country conquering the world,and see it that way. But my argument is that these types of alternativehistory creation, or counter-play, is essentially just replicating the logicof colonialism. You just happen to be the colonizer. Like, let me go con-quer England in the game – it’s still colonialism, right?

It’s literallyabout the colonisation of an entire galaxy. Those types of elements areso prevalent.But then there’s the more obvious ones like Age of Empires. Or, Em-pire: Total War. How these games work, and how they are meant to beplayed, there’s an unavoidable code there.

sages in their artifacts, viewers engage in a decoding process to in-terpret these artifacts. Hall describes three broad types of decodingthat viewers may participate in, even shifting between modes at times.

Two major camps of thought could bedescribed as the prejudice reduction model, and the collaborative so-cial action model. The scholarship on prejudice reduction dates fromthe post Second World War era and centres on individuals in societywho hold positions of power and prejudicial opinions about those theyoppress.

Larocco writes: “[...]empathy is an orientation to the other, one thatattunes to some aspect of the other’s feelings or emotions or thoughts[...] yet which may not engage with the other’s otherness at all. [...]Toput the point succinctly: feeling-with is not the same as feeling-for. [...]Empathy, for ethical behavior, is a crucial intersubjective vocalizer, butby itself as an orientation it may not direct the better angels of ournature to direct action.” (Larocco 2018, 3). Larocco here underscoresthe uncertainty around the potential of this empathic positioning, asthere are many possibilities along a spectrum, all the way from authen-tic identification with another to selective empathy that seeks to mis-construe the other as similar to the self, or identifies only with aspectsof the other perceived as similar to the self.

This perspective on technology as an unproblematic labor saving de-vice fits well with so-called common-sense but wrongheaded ideasabout technologies as neutral tools (see Myth #1) that can smoothlyand easily take on the burden of labor from humans and increase ef-ficiency. This idea has been notably critiqued by Langdon Winner butalso many other scholars of Science and Technology Studies such asBruno Latour (1996) and Susan Leigh Star (1999)

The idea of using an immersive, interactive entertainmenttechnology such as a game or VR experience to ‘change minds’ via em-pathy (which is here understood as an almost involuntary, emotionalresponse) plays into a fantasy that neatly aligns with a privileged posi-tionality, seeking quick, easy, and relatively painless methods of mitiga-tion that fall far short of actual change. Worse yet, these projects aresometime tokenised and held up in hyper visible ways, that signal toothers that change has been achieved, when it has not

The reason-ing may go something like this: if only we can use interactive or immer-sive technology to unlearn prejudice and inspire action, then the hard,painful work of the emotional and intellectual labor of coming to termswith prejudicial beliefs and attitudes could be made easier.

for possession [...] If representational visibility equals power, then al-most-naked young white women should be running Western culture.

UnReal engine(2018), he examines the ways in which the the engine itself communi-cates embedded politics, which it also forces (or at least strongly en-courages) onto designers who work with it.

scanner found at airports today (see Figure 1). This example is dis-cussed in more recent scholarship from Sasha Costanza-Chock (2020),in which they identify the narrow ways the scanner conceptualises the‘normal’ and ‘safe’ human body, marking and penalising those with bod-ies deemed ‘different’ as dangerous, such as trans and disabled people.The capabilities of the core technology of the scanner, electromag-netic waves that bounce off of and detect the surface of the body, areonly meaningful for airport security purposes when put in relation to acomparative set of data marked as “normative” (and therefore “safe”)— and herein lie the embedded politics of the technology.

Winner analyses multipleexamples and ends up concluding that while it may be true that notall technologies have embedded politics, most do, and the question ismore one of degree. One example he looks at is the technology of theatom bomb

Reproduced from Corley and Gioia (2004).

a collection of n soft-ware agents. The minimum size of n required toauthentically represent an actual group of real peopleusing software is a very relevant question, but we will notgo into further detail here

In summary, based on these observations, we believethat artificial societies with their representations of individ-uals, social networks, and the situated environment are themost promising paradigm to support policymaking when itcomes to modeling human behavior in a social contact.

agent-directed simulation that isapplied as a decision support system.

To argue,one speaker in the Russian State Duma compared the lawagainst 'LGBT propaganda' with a “victory on a battlefield”(Meduza, 2022b). In this way, the government erases theOther (the queers) from video game culture by censoring itscontent. And then, it tries to fill the gap with propagandamaterials such as the anti-Western Smuta, the militaristicSparta, private military company promotions, etc.

esthetics (admittedly associated with computer gameculture) to convince fans to join, which, in essence, meansjoining the war in Ukraine.

Although the proposed project was rejected, the caseindicates the state’s interest in specific advantages ofgames and play.

An innovative strategy which hesees, and I affirm, “elides the dualism between tech-makingand spiritual strivings”(ibid).Much of this theorization and ethos hold titles such as“Afrofuturism” (Everett, 2009) or “Soulcraft” (Royston,2022) and valorizes embodied knowledges (Daniel, 2005. qtfrom Royston, 2022) from marginalized or racializedminorities.

Rainbowism or “rainbow nationalism“ (Gqola: 2001,qf Slade 2015) is described as an ‘unintentional‘ act of“invoking the rainbow nation as means of silencingdissenting voices with regards to the status quo in thecountry...[...] and with regards to race and apartheid past“(Slade; 2015: 3). The concept of the rainbow nation;censorship

For me, the task at hand was beyond fighting embarrassment,but finding accommodating tactics to initiate what I called“Incoko” (Dialogue in IsiXhosa language) around the oftenunderplayed and hidden forms of racialized domination in theSA videogames industry. Instead of asking “Who is theoppressor?” I thought it is appropriate for everybody toassume that the scene is already racialized, therefore anygenuine discussion must root from there, as opposed to thedichotomous shaming and defense strategies that prevail inmost settings. This to me is inspired by Boaventura de SousaSantos’s transformative critical tenor that “We don’t needalternatives; we need rather alternative thinking ofalternatives” (2018, viii). That we’ve been asking samequestions, and subsequently proposing redundant andirrelevant solutions for years

I noticed a discomforting sense ofwhite fragility (DiAngelo, 2018); condescension; andinvisibilized power plays in the ensuing emails.

(young) adults, ready to do any kind of work as a refugee,just to escape crippling oppression, thus ridding theoppressive regimes of their dissidents while at the sametime providing cheap workforce for the global supporters ofthose regimes as merely another resource they can exploitas modern colonists, while constantly bringing war to theMiddle East for decades, all in the name of bringingdemocracy – or a fetishized version of it that is advertisedas synonymous with all kinds of freedom and prosperity

“Some peoplesay... I mean our producers...” which shows how media reflectthe opinions of the people who control them.

game gave theplayer “the opportunity to act out popular-culture fantasiesof middle-class youths,” and he also explained that “thereis a sense of the public sphere as a site of danger and awithdrawal from any commitment to political or collectivesocial agency that runs throughout the game.”

then-senator Hillary Clinton(2005) claimed that violent games made children violent(Tassi, 2016), and then-president Donald Trump blamedvideogames as one of the causes of school shootings

Interestingly, in GTA IV,an article on the in-game Internet says, “Long-termhealthcare can put a tremendous strain on finances,” whichreminds us that America might be the land of opportunity butonly until people get sick. In addition, when Roman, Niko’scousin, asks him if he likes America, he says it is allabout advertising, and the opportunities are not realbecause people get in debt for those opportunities and becomea slave for the rest of their lives. Moreover, thedescription of the game on the publisher’s websiteexplicitly states that Liberty City is a nightmare for thepeople who do not have money or status (Rockstar Games,n.d.).

(A) Mentoring and psychological support;

I guess from an outsider’s perspective, when you look forsome materials on women in esports, for work, you havevery few of them.

Most guys, when they see a girl, instantly conclude thatshe plays badly. Even if she’s actually a good player,it’s not enough for guys. If a guy and a girl of an equalskill make a mistake in-game, it’s okay for the guy, ithappens, but in case with the girl, she would do it “be-cause she’s a girl”, and not because even top tier playerssometimes make mistakes. Youtube has lots of fail montagesfrom female tournaments. Why point it out specifically,if any tournament has tons of mistakes.

The attitude to mixed teams among ourinterviewees was also mixed: some highlighted the importanceof training together with men, and playing against men,

Now they are just at different levels.It’s not realistic for women, they just won’t survive. Ifyou remove it now, they just won’t make it at the prolevel, no way.

Most male pros can quit university and dedicate themselvesto their gaming career, while females can not afford this.

distribution of players in CS:GO was roughly 78% men and 22%

women in competitive CS:GO. Their skills are almost nevermatched with equal popularity and, consequently, economicgains, in the established economy of attention. Thiscorresponds to the deficiencies in meritocratic valuationfound in society in general, especially in the USA

Due largely to unwelcoming public reception, all-femaleteams rarely compete with all-male teams in public, and whenthey do, they usually demonstrate lower results. However,if one looks at the average scores of female and male playerswho competed in roughly equivalent tournaments, it becomesmuch more difficult to justify the difference between prizepools. According to in-game statistics, professional femaleplayers are only 7% behind professional male players interms of skill-related metrics

neither be bored nor overwhelmed

Table 1: VUCA, BANI, and RAAT

Accordingto an understanding of violence based on social systemstheory, the concept is neither physically nor structurallypredetermined. Instead, it focusses on the communication ofinevitability when attributing to action.

The result of this mechanic is one which allows players tofeel as if their selections have narrative and ingameconsequences, while subtly rewarding them for makingdecisions which lead to positive outcomes for characters.We defined ‘positive’ here as cessation of engagement withthe slave trade or awareness of their own culpability

Domsch suggests that for game choices to feel as if theypossess meaning, they must rely on three guiding principles:they must feel meaningful 1) by being difficult to achieve;2) by making their relevance ambiguous; and 3) by notproviding full gameplay information to the player, and onlysometimes providing full gameplay information. By presentingchoices with incomplete information, the player cannot applya mechanistic decision-making process to get the idealoutcome, and thus the choice feels more meaningful. Thisforces the player to rely on the game’s narrative structureand its broader fiction.

Meaningfully engaging with a recreated historical space isa very different experience from willingly believing in afantastic or futuristic alternative world. Questions ofhistorical authenticity, accuracy and meaning all arise,particularly with such a sensitive topic as the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Ensuring that every choice issupported by research also leads to a need for design choiceswhich explicitly support player engagement and embodimentin much the same way as a living museum might.

We anticipate that this writing process willcontinue for some time, as our team has committed to ensuringthat communities in Sierra Leone approve of ourrepresentation of what is their cultural heritage andhistory. This is time-consuming but an important act ofanticolonial narrative collaboration.

Tomba and an unnamed woman weredescribed as being leaders of an abortive slave revolt aboardthe slave vessel Robert, captained by a Robert Harding fromEngland. While their attempt was unsuccessful, our teamagreed that it represented African resistance, and shouldbe the key central narrative. We decided that the unnamedwoman should be the same individual as the Temne narrativeguide, who has been reborn and wishes her story to be told.This is consistent with Temne traditions and spirituality

The initial intention behind Bunce Island: Through theMirror was only to produce a high fidelity immersive digitalenvironment

majority Temne and Mende peoples, and the smaller indigenouscultures such as the Limba, Loko and Kuranko. What we seein effect is a complex and varied tapestry of cultures andpeoples into which the European travellers and traderssailed and then settled. Those newcomers intermarried withmany coastal families, and from those unions arose Afro-European families which grew to dominate the coastal trade

In part, this aspirational aspect was due to the financialsituation of the London-based Royal Africa Company (RAC)early on; those responsible for the fort were chronicallyunderfunded and typically owed money, as seen through anextensive correspondence by the chief factor, RobertPlunkett, requesting supplies in the early eighteenthcentury.3 Those who worked at Bunce were isolated by distanceand the time period from close oversight by their companyofficials.

Just 502.9 metres by 106.7 metres (1650 feet by 350 feet),the island is small, which made it attractive to the slavetraders intending to build a fort there. Local accountsdescribe how Tasso was the first site considered for a slavefort, but proved unsuitable due to the breadth of terraininto which an escaped slave could flee. Bunce was thereforedeemed a better site and had the advantage of lying justbefore the point where the river grows too shallow for deep-water vessels to navigate.

literature on this complex relationship andsystem

Webegan to ask questions like in what type of homes thesepeople might live in. Would their homes be made of stone orof wood? What kinds of stone would they have chosen? Howmight they dress?These questions, distinctly practical, sparked others, andthe close re-reading of traveler accounts began to shedlight on new ideas and problems. Anna Maria Falconbridgedescribed orange trees at Bunce Island in the 1790s; werethese planted deliberately to address scurvy on board slaveships? Falconbridge describes seeing these trees growingnaturally along the shores of the rivers she and her husbandtraversed in the estuary, indicating that these oranges werea native variety.

And one of themost outstanding examples for this kind of interaction isQAnon, an alternate reality game if you will.

that things could have taken a different courseand characters are not determined by fate.38 He wanted toencourage the audience to occasionally leave the flow inorder to think about its origins, its direction and theimplication of this specific path.It appears reasonable to argue, that games do just that: Inorder to play them successfully, we need to be capable ofthinking about rules

Videogames do notjust fit into Foucault’s concept of heterotopias, they alsomatch what Augé describes as non-places: places of far-reaching anonymity that largely ignore social hierarchies

The modern ideal of human exceptionality accelerated by thecapitalist creed of individual responsibility and multipliedby the supermodern excess of options for individual growthhave led to widespread mental overload and feelings ofinsufficiency.28 Videogames offer relief by providing spacesdetached from the power structures of the everyday that makeit a lot easier to live up to the expectations.

Thinking about, as well as workingon, the individuals we want to become is taking up increasingparts of our everyday lives. Nothing ever seems to suffice.Nothing seems final.

excess of space, an excess of time and an excess ofindividuality.Summed up very briefly, Augé depicts a social reality inwhich advanced means of communication and travel haveenabled us to physically travel around the world in a fewhours and to virtually be present at the other side of theplanet within seconds.

It seems reasonable to argue, that it was this focus on theindividual, that provided the soil for capitalism and, evenmore obviously, for present-day technology-drivenneoliberalism that has aptly been called surveillancecapitalism9 or cognitive capitalism10.

Digital games emphasize the relevance of the playingindividual. They place us, the playing subjects, in thecenter of the experience.

Many heterosexual men, on the other hand, utilize digitalgames and the communication spaces that surround them, fora specific form of doing gender, trying to live up to anidealized image of masculinity that has seen a decline ofacceptance due to feminist criticism in many other spacesof their everyday lives.

"the playersare free because they continue to play (or were free becausethey stopped playing)".

the idea of agency as a non-essential attribute toplayers, or even human beings, is more problematic.

Now, if combined these lessons with Wittgenstein’s idea inthe Philosophical Investigations to abandon the logical formof the proposition (analytical definitions), we will arriveat a holistic notion of the normative space of all games,begging the question it would clash with the idea of beingable to give a conceptual delimitation to the game as a unitof analysis. However, the possibility of avoiding thisconclusion lies in reflecting on Wittgenstein's intentionin establishing this diffuse condition of games.A non-analytic notion of games would therefore have to bepresented on the base experience of play.

for it assumes a causallink between volitions and acts, which the samevolitions can’t possess between each other otherwiseit would lead to an infinite regress

evaluation to be possible the rules must be objective inthemselves (1982; p. 110-111)3.

someone who tells how living with an impaired body is donein practice.

In Mr. Trevers's case, a wound that doesn't heal is said to be a sign thatpoints toward diabetes and atherosclerosis of the leg arteries. But this isn't nec-essarily so: this is a meaning that has been attributed. Such attributions have ahistory, and they are culturally specific

As a complement to this, social scientists have made it their trade to listen forfeelings when they interview patients. And they have persistently and severelycriticized doctors for neglecting psychosocial matters, for being ever so con-cerned about keeping wounds clean while they hardly ever ask their patientswhat being wounded means to them.

See (asmentioned in countless interviews) Meat Boy isn’t made of animalmeat, he’s simply a boy without skin whose name is Meat Boy.”

The food bar can be replenished by eating anyof the game’s many varieties of food, of which more than half con-sist of some kind of animal flesh. Supernatural foods aside, the mostnourishing items, alongside salmon, are all cooked red meats: mut-ton, pork chop, and, of course, steak. Most of the vegetables appearon the tier below, whilst fruit sits yet further down the hierarchy,alongside raw meats and just one step up from cakes and cookies,raw fish, and rotten flesh.

“hierar-chy of foods” in which meat dominates at the top,

That gargantuan hunk of meat, dominating the meagrefruit and vegetable matter beneath, leaves us in no doubt as to theprincipal part of this meal.

play like a loser. At the end of Into the Dead, when you lose, your com-panion is killed, too

The act ofreading, Bull argues, always engages the emotions of readers, and thesuccess of any text will depend to a large extent on a reader’s sym-pathetic involvement with it. This includes identification with thegoals and objectives of the text’s characters or types. Those charac-ters or types may well be very different from the reader in terms ofage, or race, or gender, or class, but the goals and objectives, suchas escaping death or achieving personal fulfillment, for instance,are most often ones that can be shared by every reader, in that theyreflect rational self-interest. When we read, Bull suggests, we are“reading for victory.”

you will always die

Tom Nook

Donkey Kong

Sonic the Hedgehog

Tamagotchi (Bandai, 1996), surely the best known of virtual pets(though they are, strictly speaking, extraterrestrial rather than earthlyanimals)

In mostcases, civilians can be killed—players can murder or incidentally attack the wrongperson during a gunfight—but this causes players to lose a life or fail a mission.

g rape and pedophilia, it is rare to findgames in which these (especially the latter) are possible. Developers might notalways intend to forbid these actions, but they are forbidden all the same if playersare unable to simulate them. Games therefore establish a kind of moral architec-ture as boundaries are created, all without labeling actions or the need for explicitmoralizing.

Kearney considered the girly aesthetic of what shecalls “sparklefication” and its capacity to dissolve effeminophobia.66 Girl andqueer communities that embrace “sparklefication,” Kearney writes, are “cham-pioning femininity for the various pleasures it elicits and the subversive potentialit offers within patriarchal heteronormative societies.”67 Kearney acknowledgeselsewhere, however, that “[p]ink’s signifying power has been so cemented overthe past half century that it is very difficult to associate it with anything otherthan females and femininity,” making it challenging to disentangle the colourfrom its use in upholding rigid gender stereotypes.

One of the most comprehensive of these studies isKearney’s Girls Make Media. Kearney’s book charts a history of girls’ cultural pro-duction in North America, rewriting misogynistic assumptions that position girlsand women as consumers and boys and men as producers. Kearney goes as farback as the domestic crafting activities of the Victorian era to the scrapbookingby fans of classic Hollywood cinema. By the late twentieth century these practiceshad expanded to photography, music, filmmaking, zine making, and web design.

In 2019,it attracted crowds of 5,500 at two outdoor events on Halloween night, with other eventsinvolving smaller numbers, e.g. 60 older citizens attended an afternoon tea party and 780people participated in a Dracula themed fun run.Enacting hospitality as welcome and as social controlThe data suggest that both festivals are actively fostering hospitality through their practices.

enhance integration

In festival and eventsettings where people gather, e.g. to hear a favourite musician or learn about a shared interest,there is clear potential for people to set aside differences and find common ground in taste andleisure preferences (Gilroy 2004)

This understanding highlights that hospitality is not just aboutunrequited giving but always involves an exchange. For their part, the host offers a welcome,friendliness and safety. In the narrowly defined service encounter, the reciprocation expectedof the guest involves economics, as well as a tacit agreement to respect the host’s rules andregulations.

Clear-cut distinctions between hosts and guests areno longer tenable now (Larsen 2008), given that mobility is such a prominent feature ofcontemporary living (Morley 2002).

outlets like the-Score eSports presented Korean player salaries as disproportionately low,46characterizing Korean players as supreme talents exploited by corporatesponsors paying them minimal wages.47 Even as many Korean players leftfor China, the discourse evolved to see Korean players as good neoliberalsubjects due to their ease of exploitation by corporate interest.

South Korean esports ecosystem

people almostoverwork themselves, and they feel this compulsion and duty to the degreethat sometimes I think they sometimes ruin their lives.

League of Legends (LoL)

Allen Guttmann explains how modern sports differ from the games foundin ancient society. He ascribes seven distinct features (two values and fiveprocesses) to modern sports that distinguish it from ancient games: secu-larism, equality, specialization, rationalization, bureaucratization, quan-tification, and record

Christine Yano builds on Iwabu-chi’s work and thinks through what she calls the commodity “whiteface” ofHello Kitty. 31 Remarking on Japanese companies’ desires to create globallycompatible consumer products in the 1970s by mimicking Euro-Americanstandards, Yano underscores the ambiguity of the international appeal ofHello Kitty, especially her cute white face. 32 Yano links mukokuseki to mo-dernity, whiteness, and global acceptance and adeptly points out the Japanesecompanies’ willingness to self-erase for the sake of global marketability.

TzarinaPrater and Catherine Fung argue that for the Asian body’s labor to be recog-nized, it must be converted from “the foreign threat to the assimilated modelminority.”

Thinking through Hutchinson’s and Moore’s perspectives, we could arguethat Kojima’s strategy of using racial ambiguity to cater to both the Japaneseand the Western audience permits him to embody Japaneseness without anyhistorical baggage.

Noting the racially ambiguous design of the mgs series’ protagonist Snake,Hutchinson argues that the white-passing body welcomes Western playersto empathize with its message.

lhewodd,whichhadbeenfifledwifl1reds,pinks,bhies,andpastelyellows,isnowblackandwhite,exceptforherhair,whichisgreen.Herdress,whichwasredandvolunfinous,isnowblackandgray,hanginglimplyoverherlumchedbody.Nothavecontrol.IuseflicThmnbstickstotryandmovehcrtotheriglfl;butshcsh1mblesandfalls.3

Often enough riot is understood to haveno politics at all

The opposition of strike and riot thus comes to stand, viaveiled syllogism, for the opposition of Marxism

Benjamin explains that the sociotechnical imaginary is not just about revealing “how the technical andsocial components of design are intertwined, but also imagines how they might be configureddifferently.”

that inviting nonexperts or amateurs from diverse fields to solveproblems could contribute to more effective solutions and outcomes thankeeping a problem closed and away from the public.

Cell Slider par-ticipants evaluate potentially cancerous cells, helping scientists to getbetter at diagnosing cancer in future patients. Similarly, in Biogames,players help to properly diagnose malaria in cells.

If you can’t do that, someone else can.” She cited the 2022IGDA Developer Satisfaction survey in addressing the games industry retention problem:“Diverse talent tends to leave the industry at about twice the rate as white men. So, if webroaden the funnel and we bring more diverse talent in, all we’re doing is losing morepeople, and that’s not an acceptable action plan. It’s not going to make the kind of lastingchange we need to see in our industry.” Regarding retention of diverse talent, MacLeanrecommended actions for leaders and colleagues that foster an inclusive environment:charter team agreements to define core hours of work, hold team members accountable toensure they use their vacation days, accommodate remote work, create shared definitionsfor flex time schedules, develop clear promotion paths, and demonstrate care foremployees as humans. All of these were presented as ways to retain talent, especially forcaregivers. “People are willing to make these tradeoffs,” speaking of work/life balanceand caregiving in particular, “regardless of gender, regardless of family status if they seethere is a path forward.”From my perspective, intentionality and action to create positive sustainablecultures accommodating the needs of marginalized individuals signposts that the gamesindustry has acknowledged a need for correction and is beginning to support diversityand representation in a meaningful way.

A third and very central way in which UE’s design supported player empowerment was the manner in which the game facilitated the forming of a social network among its players. This was done through the narrative of the game, which told players that social innovation requires teamwork; through the complexity of the missions, which led players to collaborate; and by facilitating player communication via the discussion forum and players’ personal pages. As the game developed and players started to befriend each other, a network emerged that was transferrable to the physical world and enabled them to share ideas, knowledge, and other resources.